Young Red Sox fans know a lifetime of success

Youngsters who cheer the Red Sox skipped 'The Curse' and know Boston only for winning

Oct. 22, 2013

For Jackson Miller, 9, of Burlington, being a Red Sox fan has been pretty easy, full of victories, even championships. The latest generation of the Red Sox Nation has been spared most of the hardships that have defined older Red Sox fans, 'The Curse of the Bambino' or Bill Buckner's crushing error in 1986 for starters. / RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

The Miller family of Burlington — mom Kate, dad Travis and son Jackson — are all die-hard Red Sox fans. For many older fans, the recent triumphs of the team, including two World Series championships in the past nine years, come after enduring one of the longest dry spells in Major League Baseball. / RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS

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Sky Rahill is a 13-year-old outfielder for the Vermont Outlaws, an AAU baseball team. Guess how long he’s been a Boston Red Sox fan.

“Thirteen years,” Sky said.

Sky lives in Burlington with his parents and younger brother, Finn, also a big fan of the Sox. Sky beat his parents to Red Sox Nation.

“They weren’t really into the Red Sox until they had me,” Sky said. “But I loved them so much they followed.”

In Sky’s 13 years on earth, the Red Sox are 8-0 in World Series games with two championships. This kind of success is a recent phenomenon for Boston. You have to go back a century to find a stretch of time when the Red Sox won several World Series in a short span of years.

If you need to know suffering to fully appreciate joy, these younger Red Sox fans are really missing out. Nonetheless, the kids seem to lead pretty gratified and knowledgeable sporting lives.

“I was super-surprised in 2004,” Sky said, naming the year the curse was broken and sounding somewhat like an old-timer schooled in defeat. (He was 4 at the time.)

The Red Sox’s World Series victory nine years ago was the team’s first in 86 years. Sky watches the highlights all the time.

“I vividly remember 2007,” he said. “They swept ’em, and I remember them killing the Rockies.”

That pretty much sums up the recent history of the Boston Red Sox, who Wednesday night face the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 1 of the World Series. The Cardinals, of course, are the team the Red Sox swept in 2004. That’s around the time Sky started telling his friends the Red Sox are better than the Yankees.

It’s a pretty reasonable thing to say when your ball club comes from three games back to win four in a row and steal the American League Championship Series from the team some of us love to hate.

With the sweep of the Cards that followed, the Red Sox would end New England’s 86-year heartache with eight straight post-season wins.

The newest generation of Red Sox fans is coming of age with a different kind of experience than older followers of the team. It’s called wins. Wins in big games.

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Wednesday marks the third time in nine years the Red Sox are playing in the World Series. You’d have to be born in 1912 or before to know that kind of Sox run: Boston won four World Series championships between 1912 and 1918.

Then things got rough.

Rough took on new meaning in 1986 at Shea Stadium, Game 6, when Bill Buckner ... never mind. It’s unlikely there’s a person in Red Sox Nation (had marketers dreamed up that nation in 1986?) who thought Boston would win Game 7. The Sox didn’t.

Fast forward to 2004, and a Red Sox championship at last.

Torn loyalties

Kaitlyn Arena, 12, is a Burlington home-schooler who plays violin and roots for the Red Sox. This was not an easy choice for Kaitlyn, whose mother is a Yankees fan and whose father, born and raised in Brooklyn, roots for the Sox.

“Even though the Red Sox kind of sometimes don’t do so good, they keep on pushing on, and they, next year, they try and try and try,” Kaitlyn said. “And now it paid off, because they made it to the World Series.”

(Remember: the Red Sox finished in last place in the American League East last season.)

Kaitlyn is too young to know first-hand the tormented history of the team, yet she can recount her personal history with Boston. Her story comes with its share of emotional friction.

“I was kind of born a Red Sox fan, but my mom is a Yankees fan. So I wasn’t sure what I was,” Kaitlyn said. “I was like, ‘I’m a Red Sox fan. I’m a Yankees fan. I’m a Red Sox fan. I’m a Yankees fan. I’m a Red Sox fan.’”

She chose Boston because she was drawn to her father’s being a New Yorker who roots for the Red Sox. “My dad thought it was kind of cool that he was different,” she said. “He must’ve had a reason to be different.”

A quick check with her dad, who has lived in Vermont 17 years, reveals the following: He’s a Yankee-hater.

“I adopted the Red Sox as my team just because the enemy of the enemy is your friend,” Michael Arena, 41, said.

Some Sox fans might want to kick him out of the Nation. Closer questioning reveals that Arena, a banker, attended Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. His eighth-grade math teacher got him a ticket because he was so good at math. He was 14, and he rooted for the Mets.

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“In my lifetime, all of my teams, no matter what sport, they’re never any good,” Arena said. “But I stay loyal. And my friends can’t understand how I don’t jump ship. I will fight for my team.”

His three kids, all of whom love the Red Sox, are schooled in the history of the team, Arena said.

'That impossible dream'

Jason Lenihan, 44, grew up in Middlebury rooting for the Red Sox. He is raising two Boston fans in Burlington. Lenihan understands the generational difference between Red Sox fans as one of hope versus expectation.

“Back in the day we had hope and no expectations,” he wrote in an email to the Burlington Free Press. “I remember liking the players more than the team, really. Fisk, Rice, Evans. Those are the best Sox ever for me, but not necessarily the best Sox teams.”

His 15-year-old son, Jack, a baseball player, wears No. 9 for Ted Williams. “He reads the history books and knows about the heartache, but never lived it,” Lenihan wrote. Mary, his 11-year-old daughter, “just loves Papi and loves to say Saltalamacchia.”

Jackson Miller, 9, is a Burlington fourth-grader who fell asleep on the couch watching Saturday night’s ALCS win over Detroit. He’s going to try to stay awake for the World Series games, starting Wednesday night.

“I think they’re a good team, and they work together really well,” Jackson said. “I thought it was awesome they beat the Tigers. I expected them to be in the World Series because they are (in it) a lot. Well, most of the time.”

Most of the time if you’re 9. Not if you’re 71.

Howard Frank Mosher, 71, is a novelist who lives in Irasburg. He has been a Red Sox fan since he was 5. His novel “Waiting for Teddy Williams” was published in 2004, the year Boston won its first World Series in 86 years.

It is those winless years that hold a more familiar taste for Mosher.

As a kid, he listened to games on the car radio on top of a Catskill mountain, the only place to tune in reception. “It would fade in and out,” Mosher said. “We had to imagine everything that was happening.”

He imagined what Fenway Park looked like: the squeeze play in an infield he pictured.

“It was like heaven,” Mosher said. “Listening to those games was an imaginative experience, more than it is today.”

There’s imagination, and there’s an impossible dream. A Red Sox World Series victory became, for people of his generation, an impossible dream, Mosher said.

“Suddenly, back in 2004, they won one,” Mosher said. “So kids today don’t really have that impossible dream to cling to.”